Summary

Repenting of Whiteness: The Five Stages of White Grief. Addressing the reader again as his congregation (repeatedly using the term “beloved”), the author describes the discomfort felt by many who experience whiteness at the thought that black people are actually equal. He breaks that discomfort down into five categories, following a rough template similar to the well-known five stages of grief. The first stage, he says, is ignorance, or simply not being aware of, and not trying to become aware of, the history of racism in America as well as of contemporary black culture. “You can kill us, even brutalize us, but history makes escape from us impossible” (75). The second, he says, is denial – the denial of the facts of how, and why, statistics on black experiences in America consistently reveal a culture of black disadvantage and maltreatment.

The author then...